Don't look now, but there's a good chance that someone misbehaved in your lab recently, or will soon. In a survey published in March in the premiere issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, half of more than 3,000 NIH-funded scientists said they had failed to follow research grant rules in the past three years (http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1525/jer.2006.1.1.43).
While instances of serious infractions - such as falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism - were rarely reported, scientists more readily admitted to actions that they worried threatened the integrity of their work. In addition to not following grant rules (51.7%), this "normal misbehavior," as the authors call it, over the past three years included: deleting outlying data points (15.3%), inadequate record keeping (27.5%), cutting corners to complete a project (23.0%), and ignoring minor lab safety rules (36.1%).
Competition for research funding and pressure to produce and publish contribute to such misbehavior, ...
